mgo.licio.us

"The face of the operation is Briatore (referred to exclusively in the film by his colleagues and angry, chanting detractors as "Flavio"), an anthropomorphic radish who spends most of his time at QPR plotting to fire all of the managers."

At press time, Harbaugh had sent Michigan’s athletic department an envelope containing a heavily annotated seating chart, a list of the 63,000 seat views he had found unsatisfactory, and a glowing 70-page report on section 25, row 12, seat 9, which he claimed is “exactly what the great sport of football is all about.”

What you're describing is in no way analogous to what I'm talking about.

It always kind of boggles my mind how in conversations like this, normal people will go to great lengths to defend record companies, a group of people who simultaneously are bad for music artists and are bad for the people who enjoy music being played.

Artists don't make money off album or song sales, though. If you're making a bunch of money as a music artist, it's because you're touring and selling items based off that. I don't download off YouTube (I pay for Rdio) but even what I'm paying for Rdio is a very small income for artists. If people stopped paying for recorded performances but continued going to live shows, the people who'd really be hurting would be the record labels, generally not the artists themselves.

I'm pretty OK with the idea that a Michigan offer is considered a sign that major schools need to start looking more closely at a lowly-ranked player, because UM's scouts are so good at evaluating talent as a kid emerges from his junior year.

Nothing about that email conveyed a sense of entitelment - quite the opposite. It was entirely normal and several of the things involved are more than reasonable on their face - things like maternity leave. Rescinding a job offer over an email like that is really disgusting.

This seems like an odd thing to try to argue. Most teams most of the time don't have high-quality quarterbacks. 75% of teams don't have a QB who's in the top 25% of QBs. Not being able to immediately identify a QB replacement for Palmer last year wasn't an aberration for the Cardinals - it's normal. Very few teams have a 2nd string QB who can come in and win many games. It's why they're the 2nd string QB.

Maybe there will be a drought of quality pro QBs in five years. Maybe teams will switch back to more run-oriented offenses and we'll see a drop in passing yardage and scoring. It wouldn't be the first time the NFL has cycled like this.

The first is: what's the most likely place to find life off Earth in our Solar System? That question probably has a half dozen reasonable answers - Enceladus and Europa seem the most likely, but Mars has a pretty good shot and there are lots of other places you could make the case for (comets, anyone?).

The second question, is which place are we likely to find life on first? Enceladus might be the most likely place to harbor life in the Solar System, but we're more likely to find it on Europa because it's easier to get to Jupiter than it is to Saturn. Similarly, we could find evidence of bacterial life on Mars tomorrow. We've got things on Mars, and a mission to Europa probably wouldn't arrive for another decade or potentially more, Saturn could take even longer.

AP is a 30 year old running back who hasn't played football in a year, yet is still likely to command a very high salary. He's an extreme gamble on a position where it's rare to find a player who performs dramatically higher than the replacement level, and it's likely that it would be possible to get to 85-90% of his production with a 2nd or 3rd round draft pick next year at a fraction of the price.

If the Lions were to try to sign AP, there's no chance they'd be able to resign Suh or Fairley. Does the calculus make a bit more sense now?

There's no question that signing Adrian Peterson would be a bad football decision regardless of how you feel about the way he raises his children.

Our justice system is not centered around not sending innocent people to prison regardless of how many guitly people go free. That's a sophomoric understanding of the criminal justice system. Your entire line of conversation here is a non-sequitur.

Your "statistics" about rape cases which could go either way are also super disingenuous when our legal system has 250,000 rape kits just lying around untested right now. The majority of rape cases today cannot "go either way" because they're never given a fair shake to begin with. The only way they can go is "not guilty".

Universities aren't taking action against people accused of crimes beyond determining whether, to the best of their ability to conclude, they believe the student should still be enrolled at the school.

This is why I think other crimes are relevant. Nobody spent time crowing about how C'sonte York should be allowed to stay in school until the criminal justice system charged him with battery. Nobody argues that there should be a police investigation prior to someone being expelled for plagiarism. It's only rape that I see people suggesting there should be some kind of "wait and see what the cops say" standard.

To correct your horrible understanding of law, additionally: Preponderance of the Evidence does not mean you assume people are guilty. It means that you collect evidence, and upon reviewing that evidence, you believe that person probably committed the crime. Applying it to a rape case means you're saying "I've reviewed all the pertinent evidence, and I'm fairly sure that person raped the person they are accused of raping." At that point, it is totally and wholly logical for an university, which I'm positive will have student conduct policies that explicitly outlaw rape, to take the strongest possible action against the student: expelling them.

Being expelled from school is not a criminal sentence. It's not a violation of someone's rights. They're simply removing that student from school exactly the same as thousands of other students who've been removed from school for breaking school rules.

I realize this is a nitpick, but it's important: Something did not "happen with Clark". Clark did something. Domestic violence is not a passive event. Using the passive voice when talking about Frank Clark sheds his responsibility for beating his girlfriend (something for which he is totally responsible).

So universities which believe that they have a rapist on campus should be forced to keep that rapist on campus, potentially preying on additional students until such time as the criminal justice system convicts that person? Charges them? Indicts them?

Are there any other crimes you feel where the accused should receive special protections until the criminal justice system concludes their case? Theft? Assault? Battery? Vandalism? Plagiarism?

Why shouldn't a university be allowed to determine who has lived up to its code of conduct and remove people appropriately? What about their determination system makes it a "kangaroo court"?

You might want to go look up statistics on the incidence of false rape accusations, because when you say "Rape accusations aren't only made when someone says no", it's clear that you're misinformed on the topic. Rape accusations don't happen nearly as much as rape itself, and false rape accusations are nearly non-existent.

I think you're spot on regarding violence against men that's not reported. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that a lot of it suppressed by men themselves - the "be a man, don't complain" mentality runs strong and deep through society, even when things definitely cross the line into behavior that's actually illegal. Ending this idea that hitting men is somehow better than hitting women would be a great step for society as a whole.

Wilson's career at NC State was not great. It was pretty mediocre. If he'd had a great career at NC State, he would've gone pro that year. Instead, he had one really nice year at Wisconsin and was able to turn that into a draft pick, where he's had lots of success in the pros.

Wilson to Wisconsin was very much not a guarantee. It looked pretty desperate at the time.

Then they came for my thinly-veild nazi references because owners of a private site enforcing basic rules of behavior being compared to nazis or censors is childish behavior which I should've grown out of in the third grade.

Er no, it's not. Additionally, you may way to avoid posting about your feelings on women's roles within society while doing so using the name of a current coach at UM. Impersonating other people is the type of thing that can get really thorny really quickly and it's generally not the kind of issue you want to have to deal with.

Telling a player that they're not likely to see the 3 deep and that you would release them from transfer but won't be renewing their scholarship is very definitely not oversigning, which is offering a player a scholarship, having them commit, and then rescinding that scholarship without warning because you don't have enough slots.